Intellectual Sin

And Many, Many Other Things

Friends,

This post is a bit different. I’m going on vacation, and I have quite the backlog of things I’ve been wanting to write. So I figured I’d throw a bunch of them at you at once, each in abbreviated form. Plus, almost all of them have to do with things YOU ALL sent me. So this doubles as a mini-celebration of our community. Here’s a quick table of contents. Take your time, feel free to skip around, and let me know which ones of these got you thinking.

• The sin of thinking poorly

• C.S. Lewis’s hot take on unanswered prayers

• The best kind of love (Phantastes, Dante, & the woman at the well)

• How salvation works (via The Light Princess)

• Money is a trick

• Robin Hood on politics & evangelism

• Death by holiness

• Love is the opposite of diversifying your portfolio

• Martin Luther the Earthquake (for better & worse?)

• Narnia as deep as LOTR (and Ross’s meme game)

• Good music

Intellectual Sin

The other week, my friend Thomas Dixon who teaches New Testament at Campbell University (I’ve mentioned him before) sent me a text message which has haunted me ever since. Here it is (with his permission):

A healthy dose of my own arrogance is surely tied up in this next comment [Editor’s note: nah, Thomas is as humble as they come], but I have never been so struck as I have been in the last few years of the vicious nature of intellectual sin, and I mean that literally. Not thinking well is a vice, and thinking well is not a matter of mental horsepower or ability but rather a virtue that has to do with the will and other virtues or spiritual gifts like humility and courage and whatever the opposite of laziness is. And love of course – love the Lord with all of your mind. Intellect is a strong case for the truth of much of virtue ethics. Repeatedly not doing something makes you unable to do it. I am consistently frustrated but also surprised at how many intelligent, well educated, even otherwise good or wonderful people just refuse to think well. And I don’t know if refuse is the right word. And clearly this is not based on education; one of the tragedies of today is how much education is educating people to think poorly: emotively, politically, anything but intellectually.

I think the reason these words have haunted me is, well, because they’re true. But also, I myself have spent a number of years denigrating the importance of intellect in certain ways. It’s a tricky subject. If you speak too much around the importance of “thinking well” people tend to feel alienated: “Well, you’re just smart, and I’m not.” But as Thomas said, the main concern isn’t about mental horsepower. It’s about the discipline, the virtue, of thinking well, and the vice of of thinking poorly. This applies to almost all of us.

By way of analogy, we agree that all Christians should be generous. Some seem more predisposed to generosity than others. But that doesn’t mean that only they should be generous. Generosity is a virtue which requires practice, discipline, faith, and love. Stinginess (for lack of a better word) is an obvious vice, whether you are predisposed to it or not.

For me, this little text from a friend has reminded me that: I really do feel a calling to help people think well. And I don’t want to denigrate that calling simply because I’m afraid of seeming snobbish. Am I a snob? Perhaps. But I’m really trying not to be! And I hope that part of the legacy I (and others) will leave for our local community is a legacy of thinking well, of loving the Lord with our minds. As the rest of this email will prove, our community is already seeing amazing fruit in this regard (you guys are the best). But now I have extra encouragement to continue that cultivation. Thank you, Thomas.

C.S. Lewis On Unanswered Prayers

In my film review of Disney’s Wish (which has since been taken down, because it will be published in the next print episode of Mere Orthodoxy), Kate, perhaps my best commenter on Substack, drew my attention back to a wonderful old essay from Lewis called “The Efficacy of Prayer.” The whole thing is worth a read, but especially this section at the end, which is kind of hot take. In short, it is best not to take pride in immediately answered prayers when they come. Such answers are a mercy, not necessarily a sign of the strength of our faith. “If we were stronger, we might be less tenderly treated.”

Prayer is not a machine. It is not magic. It is not advice offered to God. Our act, when we pray, must not, any more than all our other acts, be separated from the continuous act of God Himself, in which alone all finite causes operate.

It would be even worse to think of those who get what they pray for as a sort of court favorites, people who have influence with the throne. The refused prayer of Christ in Gethsemane is answer enough to that. And I dare not leave out the hard saying which I once heard from an experienced Christian: “I have seen many striking answers to prayer and more than one that I thought miraculous. But they usually come at the beginning: before conversion, or soon after it. As the Christian life proceeds, they tend to be rarer. The refusals, too, are not only more frequent; they become more unmistakable, more emphatic.”

Does God then forsake just those who serve Him best? Well, He who served Him best of all said, near His tortured death, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” When God becomes man, that Man, of all others, is least comforted by God, at His greatest need. There is a mystery here which, even if I had the power, I might not have the courage to explore. Meanwhile, little people like you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted, beyond all hope and probability, had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage. If we were stronger, we might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent, with far less help, to defend far more desperate posts in the great battle.

Perhaps I should add: The strong and the brave—David in the Psalms, for instance, and Christ most of all—still ask the Father for what they desire. It is not as though the strongest quit asking. But they ask, knowing that God Himself is the answer they seek, and so they are at peace in the waiting.

Phantastes & The Best Kind of Love

Our little book club is reading George MacDonald’s famous fairytale Phantastes right now. I’ll be honest, it’s a tough read. Even tougher when you recall that apparently 10-year-old Lewis’s imagination was baptized by this book, which as a 40 year old, you are struggling to comprehend! But a certain moment in it really struck me yesterday. Anodos, the main character, manages to awaken the statue of a maiden by singing to her. But when he does, the maiden runs away from him and he spends a good portion of the book chasing after her to no avail. Late in the book, there’s a scene where Anodos is given a vision of the woman choosing to be with another man. The other man is a knight, a better man by all accounts. As he beholds the scene, Anodos knows that he is second best—the “moon” to his “sun”—and that the maiden should be with the knight, not with him. He was worthy enough to awaken her, but not worthy enough to have her. After the vision, he retreats back to the bosom of this wise and kind fairy woman who showed him the vision in the first place. And she sings a song over him, which, I am tempted to say, summarizes perfectly the way I understand the gospel to be slightly different than the way we often preach it these days. (The first stanza is mostly about his pain. But pay close attention to her exhortation in the second stanza, which is the remedy):

O light of dead and of dying days! 
O Love! in thy glory go, 
In a rosy mist and a moony maze, 
O'er the pathless peaks of snow. 
But what is left for the cold gray soul, 
That moans like a wounded dove? 
One wine is left in the broken bowl! — 
'Tis — To love, and love, and love. 

Better to sit at the waters' birth, 
Than a sea of waves to win; 
To live in the love that floweth forth, 
Than the love that cometh in. 
Be thy heart a well of love, my child, 
Flowing, and free, and sure; 
For a cistern of love, though undefiled, 
Keeps not the spirit pure.

Better to live in the love that floweth forth than the love that cometh in! Better to be a flowing well than a cistern undefiled! Oh man. This is what has always captivated me in MacDonald’s writing (and I think it’s part of what caught Lewis too). As Lewis explains elsewhere, Dante’s famous final line in Paradiso regarding “the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars,” is not exactly referring to the Love that comes from God, but rather to the Love of the heavenly bodies for God, which drives and regulates the Universe. Now, “We love because he first loved us.” This is taken as a matter of course. The planets wouldn’t even exist without him. But in the planets, Dante beholds that Love which first made the world now properly being returned to its Source in praise, giving shape to the eternal dance of all creation. And Dante—his desire and his will—is caught up into this dance…

Here powers failed my high imagination:
But by now my desire and will were turned,
Like a balanced wheel rotated evenly,
By the love that moves the Sun and the other stars

For me, the problem which the gospel solves is not merely, “How can God find a way to love us, despite our sin?” But rather, “How can God find a way for us to love him, despite our sin?” What Christ accomplishes in us is nothing less than the transformation of our loves. We become worthy not merely because he calls us worthy but because he makes us into those who finally love the right thing(s). Again, of course, it is his love that does this, but it is ours that must be changed. For a cistern of love, though undefiled, keeps not the spirit pure.

I was talking about this poem in our book club today with my friends Sam, William, Nathan, and PJ. And William brought up the passage where Jesus says almost precisely this to the woman at the well in John 4:

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

For both Jesus and MacDonald, the water which flows from above is seen as greater than that which is stored up below. Though the mountain spring may seem infinitely modest at its source compared to the ocean into which it flows, only the former is life-giving. Love, too, MacDonald suggest, must flow and overflow, lest it spoil in the heart of the receiver. (Likewise, the manna in the desert is good when it falls from heaven and is circulated immediately among to the people, but goes bad when it is stored up.)

The Light Princess & How Salvation Works

All this brings to mind my favorite story of MacDonald’s, The Light Princess. In the beginning, the wicked witch aunt of the princess casts a spell on her when she is just a small child. Oddly enough, the witch curses her with “lightness,” an inability to feel or embody the weight of things, both physically and emotionally. Most markedly, she cannot cry. As a result, just as she cannot shed a tear, eventually her entire kingdom suffers a drought. Near the end of the tale, a noble prince who loves the princess is led to sacrifice himself for her sake after discovering a prophecy which reads:

Death alone from death can save.
Love is death, and so is brave--
Love can fill the deepest grave.
Love loves on beneath the wave.

Before this takes place, the reader is made to believe that the prince’s sacrifice alone—his life for hers—will be enough to save her and the kingdom. But the prince knows better. The sacrifice is not mere magic. True salvation never is. After all, the princess’s curse is not only on her but in her. Most notably, it manifests itself as an inability to love, especially an inability to love the prince. The purpose of his sacrifice is, of course, to break this spell. But it must break the spell by transforming her love. Thus, just before he dies, the prince sings to her:

As a world that has no well, 
Darting bright in forest dell; 
As a world without the gleam 
Of the downward-going stream; 

As a world where never rain 
Glittered on the sunny plain; 
Such, my heart, thy world would be,
if no love did flow in thee.

Lady, keep thy world's delight; 
Keep the waters in thy sight. 
Love hath made me strong to go, 
For thy sake, to realms below. 

Let, I pray, one thought of me 
Spring a little well in thee; 
Lest thy loveless soul be found 
Like a dry and thirsty ground

When the prince dies, the princess finally cries. Through the flowing of her tears, her spell is broken and the kingdom is saved. The rains fall again. (Which brings to mind another extraordinary line from Phantastes: “Tears are the only cure for weeping.”) Anyway, in the end, the reader is made to see the true meaning of the prophecy, “Death alone from death can save”—that it must be fulfilled not only for us but in us. For us, first, of course…but if not in us, then not at all.

Money Is A Trick

One essay I’ve been working on has to do with money. Many of you have asked me if I think money is neutral. Hunter, in particular, has been bugging me to write on this. In short, no, I don’t. Money has a will of its own. It makes its own demands. A person who wins the lottery is not free to do as he pleases. No, money is not neutral. But neither do I think it is straightforwardly evil (or good!). Here’s what I think: Money is a trick. If you don’t know it’s a trick, odds are, it’s tricking you right now. But if you know, to the extent that you know, then it slowly becomes a trick you can use. If you know that money is a genie, you can actually trick the trickster and use it to your advantage. I believe, to some degree, this is what Jesus’s Parable of the Shrewd Manager in Luke 16 is about (among other things). I also believe Jesus enacts this principle with his own (hilariously casual) treatment of taxes owed to Caesar. Now, inasmuch as we are “the weak” in faith, we should be especially careful with money and alcohol and all other genies/poisons claiming to be medicines. But when we become strong in faith, we become those who may drink poison and not be harmed (Mark 16:18). The way is narrow, of course. And not many of us should presume to be on the proper path with regard to money. But I do believe such a path exists. Anyway, look into those things and let me know what you think.

Barbarian Politics, Barbarian Evangelism

I’ve been working on a longer piece on Robin-Hood-Christianity, but it’s not done so I figured I’d reveal some of the thinking here. A couple of months ago, my friend Carter Fleck (congrats on the engagement!) sent me an amazing piece by novelist and recent Christian convert(!) Paul Kingsnorth called, “We Must Become Barbarians.” I highly recommend it. Here’s a brief synopsis: The ancient Chinese Empire spoke of two types of barbarians on the edges of their civilization: raw barbarians and cooked barbarians. The raw ones nobody messed with. They remained outside the walls, didn’t even think about paying taxes, but also enjoyed none of the benefits and resources of society. The cooked ones were inside the walls, paid taxes, etc, but still couldn’t be trusted, as they had more in common with their raw cousins than with the state culture. Paul’s take: we Christians should be “cooked barbarians.” (This also jives with the main thesis of Seeing Like A State (my best non-fiction read of 2022.)

“Many of us are cooked barbarians. We are, to different degrees, in the state but not of it. Perhaps we look like good citizens on the outside. But if we coalesce as a jellyfish tribe, we can begin to dissociate ourselves from the state, while creating alternatives to it. Plenty of people are already doing this. They create cultures-within-cultures, parallel economies and ways of living. Like small furry mammals running unnoticed beneath the feet of the tyrannosaurs, we can thus build our own little worlds on the margins and wait for the coming of the meteor, which we can already see coming in the very un-sustainability of technological modernity. The mice don’t attack the dinosaurs, and neither do they wait for them to die out: they just avoid them as best they can, and get on with their work.”

“Whatever culture you come from, it will offer up at least one folk hero who earned his or her status through state-repelling behaviour. In England, we have hundreds of pirates, highwaymen, outlaws and rebels to choose from. You all know the name of the most famous: England’s shadow self, Robyn Hode, who flits through his shatter zone, the English greenwood, with his merry band of refuseniks in tow. We could do worse than to find our own greenwood and take our stand there, beneath the shelter of its great, ancient oaks.”

Funny enough, when I read this, I was in the middle of reading Louis Rhead’s Robin Hood (1912) to my boys. (My boys literally cried when we finished. I don't think anything—maybe Tom Sawyer?—has arrested their attention so well. Now we’re onto Howard Pyle’s King Arthur.) But after over a month of being steeped in Robin Hood adventures, I have some thoughts.

It strikes me that the life of Robin Hood and his Merry Men may prove an instructive picture for Christians trying to navigate this particular modern secular internet-based socio-political vortex of death we find ourselves in at present, being in the world but not of it, etc. Robin is particularly instructive for Christians in two respects, the first political, the second evangelistic.

Robin Hood Politics

The thing about Robin Hood is that he is a barbarian, but he is not a revolutionary. Yes, as you learn in the first few pages of the story, every single form of family, church, and state hierarchy has failed, or worse, betrayed him in one way or another by the time he’s a young teenager. He has every reason to rebel. But what he does instead is quite cool (and merry). He embraces his role as a merry outlaw, a “cooked barbarian” on the margins, who still has symbolic solidarity with the king and the local people, but nevertheless doesn’t really answer to any of them. He lives by his own economy, and in so doing, reshapes even the local economies around him for the better. He is a true leader of a true civilization that exists entirely outside (and yet within) England. He exists as a thorn in the flesh of the Sheriff of Nottingham and his posse of corrupt priests and bishops, but he does not fight or overthrow them. He doesn’t need to. He is freer than any man, living among a free people. And though he gives no homage to the corrupt hierarchy of his day, he manages somehow to be nonetheless loyal (to the point of sacrifice) to the hierarchies that matter most: to the church and the king and the people of Nottingham. Something to ponder.

Robin Hood Evangelism

Perhaps the most striking thing about the Robin Hood stories is how he chiefly wins not by conquering but by converting his enemies. (Note: this is also the main theme of the brilliant Red Rising series.) Anyway, the pattern goes something like this:

Robin tends to convert his enemies, not by beating them, but by losing to them (or almost). The Sheriff of Nottingham will send some minion to kill him. Robin meets him man-to-man and chooses to fight at a disadvantage (e.g. with a weapon he hasn't mastered but the other dude has; never with his bow). He'll start losing, and just before the guy is about to kill him, he'll go, "Wait!"

Minion: [Stops and looks at him.] "What?"

Robin: "Uh, sorry, do you want to quit this and just join the Merry Man?"

Buffoon: "Uh, yeah. I'd love to! Thanks!"

That's how he wins. He even, comically, tries this a couple of times with the Sheriff of Nottingham. He'll trick him, steal all his stuff and have him tied up. Then, instead of killing him, he'll be like:

Robin: "Hey, wanna come feast with the Merry Men tonight? See if you like it?"

Sheriff: "No you scoundrel!"

Robin: "Well, why don't you come anyway. You'll see. It's really pretty great." [Forces him to come feast with them and then to sleep with them on the grass of the forest]

Sheriff: [Feasts. Kinda enjoys it. Hates sleeping on the ground. Remembers his pride. Begs to be let go.]

Robin: [Lets him go, only to try it again later. He even converts the Sheriff's wife to his side. Never quite succeeds with the sheriff, but that's another story for another time.]

Anyway, Christians, I think we can learn something here.

Death By Holiness

I’ve also been working on a piece called “Death By Holiness,” inspired by our readings in Leviticus and Numbers lately (and by discussions with the fellows). It’s also not done, so I figured I’d share some of it here too. One framework that may help us to understand the more confusing elements of the Old Testament is to understand the people of God as lodged between two opposite threats of death: death by alienation and death by holiness. 

Almost all of the laws of the OT can be understood as having one of these two ultimate consequences in mind. Death by alienation has to do with God-less exposure to the fallen world, whereas death by holiness has to do with exposure to God. In the first case, it’s something like: “Do not continue to do X or else my presence will depart from you [and then you will die].” On the second: “Do not casually mix with what is sacred, lest my holy presence be profaned [and you die].”

The first is easier for us to understand. When the people of God worship foreign gods, the Lord will often “give them up” to those foreign nations. As a consequence, they are often conquered, nearly destroyed, and exiled to the nations whence the false gods proceed. Death by alienation. The farther you are from God, the closer you are to death. This makes sense to us. As modern Evangelicals, we often rely on similar imagery to describe sin and hell: alienation from God and exposure to its consequences. If a helpless child wanders too far from his parents, the source of his life, how can he survive?

However, “death by holiness” is a little harder for us to comprehend. Can a person really die by being too close to God? Well, no and yes. We were meant to be in intimate union with God. To see him face to face is the glorious end of all ends. The Old Testament purity codes do not warn against this intimate union, because, of course, union with God is the goal. Rather, they warn against approaching him improperly or casually. This may sound weird at first. “Why wouldn’t God just welcome us with open arms?” But even on the human level, we all intuitively understand that some things are too important to be approached casually.

A good example of this is sexual union. There are proper and improper ways to be sexually intimate, which lead to extremely diverging consequences. Sure, the physiological facts may be the same in each case. But sex as the final consummation of solemn vows is almost the polar opposite of sex entered into quickly, casually, thoughtlessly, or violently. The former leads to personal, relational, and spiritual life (and very often becomes a source of new life). The latter, though it may still lead to biological life, flirts with personal, relational, and spiritual death. The same is true, and to an even greater degree, with God. 

The question I have been wrestling with is this: are we in danger of death by holiness now? There do seem to be examples in the New Testament, for example Ananias and Sapphira. Paul also speaks of Christians in Corinth getting sick and dying because of improperly approaching the Lord’s Supper. But what about us? Personally, I tend to think there are more instances of this in the present day than we are willing to admit. But I will leave you in suspense for now.

Love Is The Opposite of Diversifying Your Portfolio

My friend Scott Kelsey sent me an article from Matt Yglesias, “The High Cost of Promoting Homeownership,” after a lively conversation a few of us had about affordable housing in our area. I like Matt. As thinkers on the center-left go, he’s as smart and reasonable as they come. But this piece bugged me. His main argument is that, on an individual level, homeownership is reasonable, but on a policy level, promoting it across the board is less important than it might seem. Technically, he says, we’d all be better off with a diversified real estate portfolio than having that same amount of assets tied into one home. This is hard to argue with on purely economic grounds. But that’s where I get annoyed. Because, of course, life does not exist in a purely economic world…

The problem with Matt’s logic is not technical but symbolic. He tends to think about policy from a strictly material perspective. Thus he treats owning a house like owning a commodity. "A house is an example of stuff," he says. I mean, yeah. But the trouble is, humans aren't just material beings. We don't just need "affordable housing." We need homes. So the difference between owning and renting is not just the material difference of what commodities are or are not in your portfolio. The difference has to do with whether or not you have long-term embodied connections to the physical space in which you dwell. And even from a material perspective, this spiritual fact can manifest in terms of crime rates, generational poverty, abortion, and the like. When people symbolically "rent" everything and "own" nothing, it changes their relationship with their own agency, values, virtues, goals, and beliefs. [Btw, I grant here that there could be a version of “renting” that is actually better for the soul than owning, from a Christian perspective, but that’s another story.]

The other problem with treating homes merely as commodities is that you end up with the logic he preaches in this article, that we'd all be better off if we diversified our real estate portfolios rather than just owning one home. Again, on strictly economic terms, perhaps this is true. It'd also be wiser if we were 1/10 citizens of ten different countries instead of full citizens of one country, 1/10 married to ten different spouses, etc. "You can never know which one(s) will fail!" But this is not the way life works, and certainly not the way love works. In this life, we must riskily commit to specific people, places, and things in order to see more generalized fruit eventually. 

"If everyone owned diverse real estate portfolios, they would probably be pro-development and want to capture that upside," says Matt. Yes, of course. But that would be awful. Because then we'd have nothing but profit-driven investments in generic real estate "products" across the country with little to no personal responsibility for what becomes of those "communities," rather than neighborhoods with real human investment and responsibility where you live.

What I’m saying is that love is generally the opposite of diversifying your portfolio. Of course, the fruit of such love is quite often a more diversified portfolio, just as faithful marriage to one person can lead to multiple children and grandchildren. But to get there, we must not confuse fruit with roots.

Anyway, that’s enough about economics.

Luther vs. Aquinas (via Chesterton)

This one hits a bit closer to home. As many of you know, my friend Michael Daubert suffered cardiac arrest on the soccer field with me a couple of weeks ago. Thankfully, he is alive and recovering, but still has a very long journey ahead of him. He is beginning to talk and walk a little, praise God, but he does not quite fully recognize anyone yet. Please continue to pray!

Yesterday I was looking back at my last text exchange with Michael, which was a fews of days before all this happened. He sent me a text with a bunch of screenshots from the end of G.K. Chesterton’s biography of Thomas Aquinas, which he had just finished reading. His comment to me was:

Almost perfectly captures and puts into words the nagging void / distance / lack in modern reformed theology. Aristotle and Aquinas have a lot to teach us.

I think maybe our churches do in fact need steeples, bells, stained glass, and graveyards. They need to be places of beauty again. Holy and set apart.

That last part was referring to my essay on the future of the church, which he had also just finished reading. Now, here’s the section of Chesterton’s book Michael sent me, comparing Luther and Aquinas. In short, Chesterton is considering how Luther’s emphatic style and “earthquake” presence managed to erase the more modest and balanced wisdom of Aquinas for about 400 years since, but that perhaps now that wisdom is beginning to emerge again. Whether or not, as Protestants, we fully agree with Chesterton (a Catholic) here, I still think it should give us pause. It certainly makes me think…

…there was one particular monk, in that Augustinian monastery in the German forests, who may be said to have had a single and special talent for emphasis; for emphasis and nothing except emphasis; for emphasis with the quality of earthquake. He was the son of a slatecutter; a man with a great voice and a certain volume of personality; brooding, sincere, decidedly morbid; and his name was Martin Luther. Neither Augustine nor the Augustinians would have desired to see the day of that vindication of the Augustinian tradition; but it one sense, perhaps, the Augustinian tradition was avenged after all.

It came out of its cell again, in the day of storm and ruin, and cried out with a new and mighty voice for an elemental and emotional religion, and for the destruction of all philosophies. It had a peculiar horror and loathing of the great Greek philosophies, and of the Scholasticism that had been founded on those philosophies. It had one theory that was the destruction of all theories; in fact it had its own theology which was itself the death of theology. Man could say nothing to God, nothing from God, nothing about God, except an almost inarticulate cry for mercy and for the supernatural help of Christ, in a world where all nature things were useless. Reason was useless. Will was useless. Man could not move himself an inch any more than a stone. Man could not trust what was in his head any more than a turnip. Nothing remained in earth or heaven, but the name of Christ life in that lonely imprecation; awful as the cry of a beast in pain.

We must be just to those huge human figures, who are in fact the hinges of history. However strong, and rightly strong, be our own controversial conviction, it must never mislead us into thinking that something trivial has transformed the world. So it is with the great Augustinian monk, who avenged all the ascetic Augustinians of the Middle Ages; and whose broad and burly figure has been big enough to block out for four centuries the distant human mountain of Aquinas. It is not, as the moderns delight to say, a question of theology. The Protestant theology of Martin Luther was a thing that no modern Protestant would be seen dead in a field with; or if the phrase be too flippant, would be specially anxious to touch with a bargepole. That Protestantism was pessimism; it was nothing but bare insistence on the hopelessness of all human virtue, as an attempt to escape hell. That Lutheranism is now quite unreal; more modern phases of Lutheranism are rather more unreal; but Luther was not unreal. He was one of those great elemental barbarians, to whom it is indeed given to change the world. To compare those two figures bulking so big in history, to any philosophical sense, would of course be futile and even unfair. On a great map like the mind of Aquinas, the mind of Luther would be almost invisible. But it is not altogether untrue to say, as so many journalists have said without caring whether it was true or untrue, that Luther opened an epoch; and began the modern world.

He was the first man who ever consciously used his consciousness; or what was later called his Personality. He had as a fact a rather strong personality. Aquinas had an even stronger personality; he had a massive and magnetic presence; he had an intellect that could act like a huge system of artillery spread over the whole world; he had that instantaneous presence of mind in debate, which alone really deserves the name of wit. But it never occurred to him to use anything except his wits, in defense of a truth distinct from himself. It never occurred to Aquinas to use Aquinas as a weapon. There is not a trace of his ever using his personal advantages, of birth or body or brain or breeding, in debate with anybody. In short, he belonged to an age of intellectual unconsciousness, to an age of intellectual innocence, which was very intellectual. Now Luther did begin the modern mood of depending on things not merely intellectual. It is not a question of praise or blame.; it matters little whether we say that he was a strong personality, or that he was a bit of a big bully. When he quoted a Scripture text, inserting a word that is not in Scripture, he was content to shout back to all hecklers: “Tell them that Dr. Martin Luther will have it so!” That is what we now call Personality. A little later it was called Psychology. After that it was called Advertisement or Salesmanship. But we are not arguing about advantages or disadvantages. It is due to this great Augustinian pessimist to say, not only that he did triumph at last over the Angel of the Schools, but that he did in a very real sense make the modern world. He destroyed Reason; and substituted Suggestion.

It is said that the great Reformer publicly burned the Summa Theologica and the works of Aquinas; and with the bonfire of such books this book may well come to an end. They say it is very difficult to burn a book; and it must have been exceedingly difficult to burn such a mountain of books as the Dominican had contributed to the controversies of Christendom. Anyhow, there is something lurid and apocalyptic about the idea of such destruction, when we consider the compact complexity of all that encyclopedic survey of social and moral and theoretical things. All the close-packed definitions that excluded so many errors and extremes; all the broad and balanced judgments upon the clash of loyalties or the choice of evils; all the liberal speculations upon the limits of government or the proper conditions of justice; all the distinctions between the use and abuse of private property; all the rules and exceptions about the great evil of war; all the allowances for human weakness and all the provisions for human health; all this mass of medieval humanism shriveled and curled up in smoke before the eyes of its enemy; and that great passionate peasant rejoiced darkly, because the day of the Intellect was over. Sentence by sentence it burned, and syllogism by syllogism; and the golden maxims turned to golden flames in that last and dying glory of all that had once been the great wisdom of the Greeks. The great central Synthesis of history, that was to have linked the ancient with the modern world, went up in smoke and, for half the world, was forgotten like a vapor.

For a time it seemed that the destruction was final. It is still expressed in the amazing fact that (in the North) modern men can still write histories of philosophy, in which philosophy stops with the last little sophists of Greece and Rome; and is never heard of again until the appearance of such a third-rate philosopher as Francis Bacon. And yet this small book, which will probably do nothing else, or have very little other value, will be at least a testimony to the fact that the tide has turned once more.

Narnia As Deep As LOTR?

I am perhaps the greatest C.S. Lewis fan that currently exists. And yet even I would not be tempted to suggest that Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia carry the same literary and thematic depth as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. In fact, Lewis himself would probably agree with me. In his initial written review of The Fellowship of the Ring, he called it “lightning from a clear sky.” Having said that, about a month ago, my friend Zach Kuenzli started peppering me with texts about a scholarly work entitled Planet Narnia.

I have an important question for you: Have you read Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia? You will be so happy lol. The thesis is extraordinary.

No, I said, hadn’t heard of it. But the texts kept coming. So finally, I bought the book (or did Zach buy it for me? he often does; good friend). And MAN, he was not wrong. Like I said, I have never been tempted to think Narnia had as much depth as LOTR. But now I am. The main, very bold, claim of the book is that Lewis had a deeper (and completely secret) thematic mission for the entire series—yes, deeper than all the obvious Christian allegorical stuff—which has to do with the medieval view of the seven planets how each relate to and are fulfilled in Christ. All I can say is: Zach was right. It has made me very happy.

And yeah, that’s my nerdy meme about it. As my fellows know, the “midwit meme” is my favorite meme format, as its “second naiveté” structure is the perfect setup to express Christian theological wisdom. Usually I would just draw them on the whiteboard for the fellows. But, world get ready, Ross has discovered the meme generator.

Finally, Good Music

Since this post has been a love-fest of the brilliant and talented in my community, I thought I’d end by sharing some wonderful music that’s being made in our community. The aforementioned William Leaton put out a gorgeous album the other week (also, brilliant instrumentals/vocals from David, Ben, & Carter!). This is my favorite song from it, but please check out the whole thing.

Finally, my mechanic and good friend Dan Kim is going through his own song-writing (and faith) revival. The song ideas he is sending me via text are blowing my mind. I leave you with this one, with his permission. I’m crying as I listen to it and press send to you…